Personality may affect how baboons collect and use social information, according to a recent study.

In their study, researchers said bold and or anxious baboons are more likely to acquire new information about new food sources. This suggests that personality influenced whether baboons solved foraging tasks and whether they then demonstrated to others how to solve the tasks, Wired reported.

For more than three years, investigators performed two types of experiment in which the baboons could learn about a novel food source by watching another baboon with it.

"Though bolder baboons learnt, the shy ones watched the baboon with the novel tasks just as long as the bold ones did, but did not learn the task," lead author Alecia Carter of the University of Cambridge said in a statement. "In effect, despite being made aware of what to do with the tasks they were still too shy to do anything with it afterwards."

Researchers said this means there was a difference between collecting social information and using social information.

They also found a similar mismatch for anxiety: calm baboons watched a demonstrator for longer than anxious individuals, but it was the anxious individuals which learnt the task.

"These results are significant, because they suggest that in cognitive tasks animals may perform poorly not because they aren't clever enough to solve the task, they may just be too shy or nervous to interact with it. Individual differences in social learning that are related to personality may thus have to be taken into account systematically when studying animal cognition," Carter said.

The researchers' findings also suggest that the baboons' social networks may prevent them from learning from others.

"I couldn't test some individuals no matter how hard I tried because although they were given the opportunity to watch a knowledgeable individual who knew how to solve the task some baboons simply never went near a knowledgeable individual and thus never had the opportunity to learn from others," Carter added.

Researchers said the findings may impact how people understand the formation of culture in societies through social learning.